Matt Gurney: Ford can fight the media and win, but not the police

If there’s anything Toronto has learned about its mayor, Rob Ford, it’s that he can take the worst that the media can throw at him without missing a beat.

For his three years in office, and even during his tenure as an oft-controversial councillor, many of the city’s journalists — and the Toronto Star, virtually as an institution — have criticized the mayor at every opportunity. Some of those stories have been legitimate matters of public concern, handled with proper care. Some have not.

Mr. Ford has endured it all. All the negative stories penned about him have not just failed to bring them down, they even worked to his advantage.

Each scathing story in the Star or the Globe was received by Ford Nation foot soldiers as yet more proof of the righteousness of their cause. Even Mr. Ford’s recent dust-up with the traditionally Ford-friendly Toronto Sun, specifically columnist Joe Warmington, was received without much protest by the mayor’s fans. Ford Nation, it seemed, had always been at war with Sunlandia. And it didn’t hurt Mr. Ford a bit.

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In a few brief minutes, he has done what a contingent of rabidly anti-Ford Toronto media types could not do in years of trying. Standing before a podium, and in calm and measured tones (with even a few smiles for the gathered reporters), the Chief announced that officers under his command had recovered the infamous “crack video” reported by the Toronto Star and U.S.-based website Gawker. While refusing to discuss the video in detail, Chief Blair confirmed that the content of the video, which he has seen, was in line with what had been reported — that a clearly impaired Mr. Ford smokes an unknown substance from glass pipe of the type used to inhale crack cocaine.

And then, in the coup de grace, Chief Blair told reporters that he was “disappointed” with what he’d seen on the video.

“Disappointed.”

After all the ink that’s been spilled about Rob Ford, all the airtime filled discussing every aspect of his private and public life, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything as devastating to the mayor’s credibility, his reputation and his very brand as leader of the city’s conservative movement as that one word.

Mr. Ford can brush off the media as self-interested and desperate to advance a political agenda different from his own. But the Toronto Police computer technology section? And its mild but honourable Chief?

Ford has no answer to this development. What could he say?

There is no salvaging him after this. Chief Blair has destroyed him in the eyes of the public. It is astonishing that Mr. Ford thinks he can continue on in his job even after his very own Chief of Police has come out and told reporters that a video Mr. Ford insisted did not exist, not only exists, but will be sent to the courts.

The most shocking part of the Chief’s devastating remarks were how suddenly they came after what appeared to be another Ford escape from near-political death. The 500-page document released by court order to the public on Thursday morning, which lays out in detail Mr. Ford’s connection to Alexander Lisi, a convicted criminal accused of drug possession and distribution, contained no smoking guns. Plenty of spent shell casings, perhaps, but nothing that absolutely established any illegal activity by the mayor.

Mr. Ford has thrived in such infinitesimal quantities of wiggle room. No smoking gun? Total vindication! You could hear Ford Nation sucking in a great, collective breath, preparing to shout as one, “Is that the best you’ve got, media elites? A few dodgy characters, the odd shady meeting? Where’s the proof?”

It would have been the same old story. Mr. Ford would deny wrongdoing. Some people wouldn’t believe him, and those who stood by the mayor would feel emboldened by yet another failure of his media enemies to land a knock-out punch. Déjà vu all over again.

But not this time. Chief Blair and the officers under his command, who salvaged the video from hard drives seized in accordance with lawful investigations, can’t be ignored, or dismissed as agenda-driven enemies of the mayor. Mr. Ford could fight the media, and win, often aided by the overreach of journalists a little too eager to score a point on a man who made an admittedly easy target.